Calculate billed time and cost using standard legal billing increments (6, 10, or 15 minutes). See how rounding affects your legal bill.
Many law firms bill in time increments rather than to the exact minute. A short call or email may therefore round up to the firm’s minimum billing unit, commonly 0.1 hour, 0.2 hour, or 0.25 hour. Over many small tasks, that rounding can materially change the effective cost of the work.
This calculator shows how the selected increment affects billed time, total billed value, and the effective hourly rate once multiple tasks, travel time, and administrative time are included. It is useful for reviewing invoices, comparing billing policies, and understanding how small rounding rules affect total legal spend.
Billing increments are easy to overlook on an invoice because each entry may look small by itself. This page makes the rounding effect explicit so you can compare 6-, 10-, and 15-minute policies and see what they do to total billed time over repeated short tasks.
Billed Increments = ceil(Actual Minutes / Increment) Billed Minutes = Billed Increments × Increment Cost = (Billed Minutes / 60) × Hourly Rate
Result: $80.00 billed for 8 actual minutes
Actual: 8 minutes. Rounded up: ceil(8/6) = 2 increments = 12 minutes. Cost: (12/60) × $400 = $80. You paid $80 for 8 minutes of work — an effective rate of $600/hour.
Consider an attorney who makes ten 3-minute phone calls in a day at $400/hour with 6-minute increments. Actual time: 30 minutes ($200). Billed time: 60 minutes ($400). The rounding doubles the cost.
Batch communications, request itemized invoices with task-level detail, ask about billing increments upfront, and periodically audit invoices against your own records of interactions.
The ABA Model Rules require attorneys to charge reasonable fees. Excessive rounding or padding of time entries can constitute an ethical violation. Clients who suspect overbilling should address concerns with the attorney or file a complaint with the state bar.
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This page rounds the entered task duration up to the selected billing increment for each task, multiplies that rounded time by the monthly task count, then adds the separate travel and administrative time entered by the user. It reports billed time, billed value, and the effective hourly rate produced by the chosen rounding policy.
The page is designed to help review invoices and compare billing policies, not to decide whether a particular time entry is ethically reasonable in context. Real invoices still depend on the engagement letter, task descriptions, staffing structure, and the applicable professional-conduct rules.
The most common increment is 6 minutes (0.1 hours). Some firms use 10-minute or 15-minute increments. A few modern firms bill in 1-minute increments. The larger the increment, the more you pay in rounding.
Studies show billing increments add 10–25% to total legal costs. The impact is greatest for short tasks like phone calls and emails, where a 2-minute call becomes a 6-minute charge.
Yes. More firms are adopting 1-minute billing, especially for routine communications. Negotiate the increment when you engage the attorney. Even moving from 15 to 6-minute increments can save significantly.
Attorneys often bill in tenths of an hour. Each tenth is 6 minutes. A 0.1 entry means 6 minutes (minimum), 0.2 means 12 minutes, 0.3 means 18 minutes, and so on. One full hour is 1.0.
Yes. If you see many 0.1 (6-minute) entries for tasks that likely took 1–2 minutes, discuss this with your attorney. Ethical rules require attorneys to bill for time actually spent, not to pad entries.
Block billing is when an attorney groups multiple tasks into a single time entry (e.g., "Research, drafted motion, made calls — 3.5 hours"). This makes it hard to evaluate whether the time was reasonable.